Reviews for The environmental economic revolution

The average rating for The environmental economic revolution based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-15 00:00:00 Jack Vaughan This is a hard book to read and recommend (or not recommend), so some explanation is required. If you (a) realize that the environmental crisis is really, really serious, "end of civilization" type stuff, and are wrestling with the problem of the social adjustments necessary to deal with the environmental crisis, and (b) have some background in Marxist thinking, and (c) find Marx attractive without necessarily buying everything he says, then you will like this book and should definitely read it. If you don't fulfill either (b) or (c) you are going to have problems with this book. You'll probably get bogged down somewhere after page 50, if you make it that far, and give up. I'd suggest looking at chapters 2, 7, and 9, though. I started out somewhat predisposed to give it 3 stars on the basis that the basic idea of the book is good but the rhetoric was off-putting. Then it became clear that you couldn't just breeze through this book, you had to go through paragraph by paragraph, and by the middle of the book I almost put it down. But I kept reading, and then towards the end of the book the author seems to regain his sense of mission. And if you're a Marxist: please consider this a five-star review, because the main negative in my mind is excessive reliance on Marxist rhetoric. I was a Trotskyist in my younger days so I am used to this sort of thing. I remember laughing at one of Lenin's titles, "Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," because the title itself seemed "over the top." What turned me off to Marxism was not a sudden embrace of liberal capitalism but the perception that the movement was being propelled forward by constant anger, and hoped to increase and exacerbate this anger as a way of getting things done. This anger had a debilitating effect on the movement. In the end people's anger turned on each other and so you had all these complicated divisions and nothing got done. The premise of this book is that capitalism is the enemy of nature. But here's the first problem: this is something which cannot really be "demonstrated," because it requires a paradigm shift. This is something I wish Kovel had acknowledged in a more straightforward way. Kovel talks about the Bhopal disaster. If you're really hell-bent on justifying capitalism, this event in itself is not a problem. It's bad, but it's because the people involved were corrupt, the governments' policies lax, and so forth -- not capitalism itself. What about other capitalist environmental disasters, mountain-top removal, global warming, or peak oil? Well, obviously we have a problem. Major critical reforms are necessary. But is the problem capitalism, or something else? Sure, capitalism is implicated, but isn't socialism implicated too? Did Marx actually say anything about this? Kovel rightly addresses these very questions. He is an advocate of eco-socialism, and he doesn't mean we'll worry about the environment after the revolution. It's an integral part of his platform, and he dislikes the opportunistic way of approaching this problem that says that "socialism will solve all our problems." I think that Kovel could have addressed this issue -- of paradigm change vs. reform, "proof" vs. "seeing" -- in a more straightforward way. The second problem is all the Marxist rhetoric. One of the more intriguing chapters in the book is "critique of actually existing eco-politics." He discusses ecological economics, and I've read such people as Herman Daly (Ecological Economics, with Joshua Farley) and Jack Manno (Privileged Goods). I have to say that I don't see any place where he specifically refutes something intrinsic to the position of ecological economics. As I understand it, E. E. would argue for social control of the size of the economy and distribution of goods, but allowing a free market to handle the allocation and price. So, what does Kovel think? Is this actually good enough to call eco-socialism, regardless of the what Daly et. al. say? It's not clear. So I wish Kovel had written a book for people who aren't necessarily Marxists at all. There's a problem with ecological economics as well. They are concerned to show that their ideas are not radical so as to increase its academic respectability. So they emphasize that they are keeping some aspects of the free market. They have some of the same problems as Kovel: being caught up in rhetoric (in their case academic instead of Marxist) in trying to communicate their positions. My take on this is that if you got behind the rhetoric and said, "this is what we need," that it would turn out that ecological economics and Kovel are actually pretty close together. You could make a case that it is, or is not, socialism. The case for calling it socialism is that all this government control, if actually implemented, is certainly going to look and feel like socialism, even though the free market remains. We need the "eco" part too -- government control, in and of itself, will not solve the problem, and may in fact make the situation worse. So socialism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of dealing with the environmental crisis. Bottom line, and this is why I am giving the book a relatively high recommendation: almost no one else is talking about this. The people who are talking about it, namely ecological economists, also have difficulty with the rhetoric (of academic rhetoric, not Marxist rhetoric). The reason for this is, I think, that this is a difficult subject and we are exploring things for which language is not yet quite adequate. So Kovel is worth reading. Thanks for writing the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-03 00:00:00 Sheila R Desranleau i have read a lot of the overview, survey type texts on capitalism being anti-ecological at its core and the dire need for a more democratic, egalitarian and (eco)socialist future. so when i started this book i already went into it with a sense of 'i know all this stuff.' that said, this is may be my favorite of the survey type books. i have read all of John Bellamy Foster's books as well as chris william's fantastic book Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis and while this book contained a lot of the same material there was a very pronounced aspect of philosophy to this book that was refreshing. there was very much a desire for the reclamation of our basic humanity that is key to the ecosocialist future. my point being, even if you have read a lot on this topic this is a fantastic book. and if you have not read any of those other works, this is a great place to start as we need to be clear on what we, as environmentalist are fighting for and have a clear understanding of not just what will work but also what will not work. and nothing that simply tinkers around the edges of the system will work. we need to get rid of capitalism if we have any chance for any sort of future that isn't some sort of dystopian nightmare.